Sixty Days: Taking another punch

— The gut punch has always been an effective method of getting access to the chin.

After Friday’s blow to the midsection, we just took a pretty good shot upstairs – our first resignation, and it’s a tough one for everyone. Chris McGann, our outstanding state government reporter, resigned this morning to go to work as Communications Director for State Treasurer James McIntire.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy for Chris. It’s a good landing for a guy who lives in Olympia and has two kids to support. He is a great reporter. I’m sure he’ll be effective in his new job too. Good luck, Chris.

— Note to self: Quit saying, “How are you doing?” when you pass someone in the hall or go by their desk. It’s an old habit that doesn’t work well in our current circumstance. It has lost all meaning. You get either a tight little superficial “okay…under the circumstances” or a weird sidelong look. I know how it feels when somebody asks me.

— I can’t help feeling as though we’ve done something badly wrong to get to this position. It’s got me asking myself how could we have stayed more relevant to more people’s lives.

It’s easy to blame our potential demise on forces beyond our control, and newsroom conversations would confirm there are no shortage of targets – the overall decline of print, the economy, the dysfunction of the JOA, the corporation. But the truth is, we have to shoulder our share of it. Certainly, as the chief newsroom decisionmaker, I do.

Of course, all of us hear the full spectrum of criticism – we’re too superficial, we’re too focused on in-depth work that people won’t read, we’re too local, we’re not local enough. We’re too liberal, too conservative, too elitist, too inclusive. We’re too focused online, we’re not focused online enough. I don’t put a lot of credence in all of that chatter, frankly. I think most of it misses the big picture. But the fact remains that we do need to honestly appraise our own performance.

I think as an industry we started our slide from a place of arrogance and self-importance. I think that nationally and locally, we’ve been slow to respond to changes in the market, in readers’ needs and in technology. I think larger papers, like the P-I, gradually ossified by demanding years of experience for any opening, and paid too little attention to diversifying, in terms of age, ethnicity and gender, to better reflect the communities they serve. I think we haven’t done a good job of marketing ourselves, of making sure people understand that what we do actually is valuable. I think we got trapped between serving the readers we wanted to attract and the readers we actually had. And we haven’t done a very thorough job of continuing to research our readership and our potential readership.

I’m sure there’s more to that list.

— Bittersweet news: I just got a phone call announcing that one of the investigative series I mentioned in the blog yesterday – The Strong Arm of the Law, by Eric Nalder, Lewis Kamb and Daniel Lathrop – won the 3rd annual Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting award from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is part of the City University of New York. There’s no circulation breakdown – the award was open to entries from any newspaper, magazine or web site – and awards are given in just two categories – single story and series.

Congratulations to Eric, Lewis and Daniel. They’ll split the $1,000 prize. Also, congrats to Rita Hibbard, who edited the series; to Marsha Milroy, who did research work for it; and to photographers Scott Eklund, Mike Urban, Grant Haller and Gilbert Arias, all of whom contributed work to the series.

— Just a few minutes ago, this email appeared in my inbox:

Dear Media Industry Professional,
I am writing to ask for your help with the second annual PRWeek/ PR Newswire Media Survey. This survey asks journalists and bloggers about the changing media environment and how it is impacting their specific outlets, job duties, interaction with PR professionals, and more. The survey results will be published in an article in the April 6 issue of PRWeek.